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I don't give my SS to anyone except the bank and for SS tax purposes. My last power company tried to insist I give it to them, when I asked WTF they needed this for simply connecting power they said for a 'credit check'. I talked further and found out they'd take a deposit in lieu of this and that's the road I took. I got the deposit refunded about 6mos later I think.

These companies really don't need it. When I setup my cable, electric etc. I didn't have an SSN, it takes time to get one when you are an immigrant. As soon as they learned I just didn't have one then they went down an alternate procedure. I think in the end I only had to leave a deposit with the cell phone company, everyone else just connected me.

This can be a pain down the line when trying to deal with these companies over the phone though as everyone wants the last 4 digits of your social as part of their authentication process.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a chronic shortage of tech savvy teacher all over Africa, and at the same time a strong belief that the tech economy is vital to growth. Enter Afrimakers, a crowdfunded project to visit tech hubs in seven continents and leave behind Arduino boards, Raspberry Pis, sodlering kits and — most importantly — the smarts to use them. The Indiegogo fund opened up a week or so ago, and they've managed to raise enough for the first two countries so far."

Brandon Butler (2829853) writes "Some believe the IaaS cloud computing market entered a new stage this week with the general availability release of Google Compute Engine. Amazon Web Services has dominated this market given its multi-year head start, leading to significant feature parity compared to any other IaaS cloud provider. No other company has the breadth and depth of databases, storage options and virtual machine instance sizes to match AWS. But the GA of GCE, which came with new support for RHEL and SUSELinux, plus live VM migration and a price drop, means that Google is here to stay in the IaaS market. The question is, can it give AWS a run for its money?"Link to Original Source

Since Thanksgiving is non-secular holiday I would be interested to know how many religions forbid it.

I don't know about the religious aspect, but as an immigrant Thanksgiving isn't a holiday which means much to me personally aside from having a couple of days off. I mean I understand an appreciate the significance, and I have been lucky enough to visit families and experience a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but a family orientated holiday doesn't mean a lot when the rest of your family doesn't really care.

the absolutely insulting audacity to cut to commercial during the 7/7 London Bombing memorial.

That quite frankly is an appalling and shocking way for a national broadcaster to behave. Also I heard that the commentators didn't know who Sir Tim was and suggested that views Google him, did that really actually happen?

Also, I would have thought that an SE who wants to go back to dev would be gold dust. A dev who has spent all that time in the field trying to sell is a fantastic asset to any product company, and any product company should know this.

We started going more exotic places. Places that don't have cell signal or internet access. If they want to call a boat to the tune of $5-$10 a minute they're welcome to.

I hear that option. I've decided to go to Cuba for my next vacation, I'm in the UK but the rest of my team is in the US, as is our mail server. I figure that I won't be able to connect to the mail server even if I wanted to, and thus ensure 2 weeks of complete downtime

I agree with you on the 75%. I just changed from working in an office when not at customers to working from home, new job and no office in my country. It is incredibly easy to forget to stop working when working from home. If my wife is out for the evening she has started to phone me at about 7 and ask if I am still working, and if so might it not be a good idea to stop.

Also it's pretty nice to take 30 minutes at lunch time and actually have somewhere to go at relax with some food, a book and some peace and quiet

I think the bigger impact for some people will be being even further ahead of the US in terms of timezone. At the moment 5 hours is okay, I work with people in the Middle East, Europe, UK and the east coast, from the UK and this is manageable at the moment. I don't start work until about 9 and then work till about 7 or 8 if needed. This gives me a good amount of overlap with everyone. If this goes ahead then I'm going to be have to work later into the evenings sometimes, just negating the increase in outside drinking time, and giving me less quality time with my wife who will be working normal UK hours.

Nice idea, but not something that is particularly convenient for myself